Open textbooks with Quarto and GitHub
Workshop for Education Support colleagues at the UU library
Content
- Introducing R, RStudio, and Quarto
- Basic set-up and GitHub publication of a Quarto book
- ☕ BREAK
- Text editing in Markdown
- The git workflow
- ☕ BREAK
- Interactivity options (demo)
- Publishing and archiving
R and RStudio
![R logo]()
Programming language
![RStudio logo]()
Pretty interface to interact with R
(and git, and Quarto)
The Rstudio interface
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Quarto
“An open-source scientific and technical publishing system”
Turn text documents (.qmd) into html, pdf, epub, docx and more.
Today: 💻 html (documents that can be hosted on the web)
Books 📖, but also: slides, blogs, articles, websites, and more.
Quarto: some history
Quarto = more extensive version of R markdown.
Rmarkdown: make science more reproducible.
Document (.Rmd) containing both R code (R) and text (markdown).
When rendering an R markdown document, all code gets executed as well.
Same for Quarto!
But: more features + more recent than R markdown
What did we just do?
Create a Quarto Book project in RStudio
Render the Book to html
Turn the project folder into a git repository (more later!)
Upload (“push”) the project files to GitHub
Turn on GitHub pages to publish the html files online
EX: Make a change and publish it
For example:
Remember, to upload a change to GitHub:
git add yourfilewithchanges (select which files to make a snapshot of)git commit -m "Make x change" (create the snapshot with message)git push (upload to GitHub)
Markdown
A Markdown introduction
EX: Format some text
Bold, headers, bullet points, links
EX: Embed image, video, pdf
We need to provide the syntax to do this.
EX: Cite the reference from the bib file
We need to tell them how to do this
Git and the git workflow
Explain what git is
Do a round of add-commit-push
Some git terminology
Commit
Pull
Pull request
Merge conflicts
Interactivity options
H5P
webexercises R package
other options
Publishing and archiving
Archive the repository in Zenodo sandbox
